Tuesday, March 11. 2014

Note: a low-fi, unautomated responsive house, where residents still have to take actions, make decisions that are not delagated to a badly designed algorithm... When it comes (or will soon come) to smart houses, smart cities, etc., we (designers, architects, ...) will have to design algorithms and behaviors that matters and that continue to trigger decisions among people. This is obviously not only an engineer's job. It also is (profund respect), just not only. So, do they teach algorithms and processes design (which remains different than "generative design" commonly taught) in architecture schools? Rarely, I'm afraid...

The resident of a compact apartment in Madrid demonstrates how she can rearrange walls and pull furniture out of the ceiling in this movie by photographer and filmmaker Miguel de Guzmán.

Designed by Spanish studio Elii Architects, the Didomestic apartment occupies the loft of an old building, so it was designed to make optimal use of space by creating flexible rooms that can be adapted for different activities.

Sliding pink partitions allow the main floor to be either opened up or divided into a series of smaller spaces, while a new mezzanine loft provides a bedroom where floor panels hinge open to reveal a vanity mirror, toiletry storage and a tea station.

The architects also added several fun elements to tailor the space to the resident's lifestyle; a hammock, playground swing and disco ball all fold down from the ceiling, while a folding surface serves as a cocktail bar or ironing board.

"Every house is a theatre," explained the architects. "Your house can be a dance floor one day and a tea room the next."

The movie imagines a complete day in the life of the apartment's inhabitant, from the moment she wakes up in the morning to the end of an evening spent with a friend.

"The idea was to show all the different spaces and mechanisms in a narrative way," said De Guzmán.

Getting dressed in the morning, the resident reveals wardrobes built into one of the walls. Later, she invites a friend round for a meal and they dine at a picnic table that lowers down from the kitchen ceiling.

A rotating handle on the wall controls the pulleys needed to bring this furniture down from overhead, while other handles can be used to reveal shelving and fans.

A metal staircase connecting the two levels is contained within a core at the centre of the apartment and is coloured in a vivid shade of turquoise.

A shower room lined with small hexagonal tiles is located to the rear of the kitchen, plus there's a bathroom on the mezzanine floor directly above.

This project is the result of a residency we did in Beijing last spring, at the Tsinghua University (TASML) and has certainly some unconscious relation with the experience of climate we had in the city!

Deterritorialized Living is an artificial troposphere that reverses our causal relationship to the natural rhythms of day and night, air, seasons, time. It is a “man made” environment where the atmosphere is the effect, continuously shaped from the global activities on the networks produced by humans and robots. The aim of this artificial, almost fictional atmosphere is to give permanent presence (at this stage only in the form of data flows) to what has paradoxically become an ambient, "atmospheric" and contextual experience of deterritorialisation / detemporalisation induced by the massive use of networks, transportation devices, flows of data or communication technologies. Therefore, to literally become able to "breathe" the environment we are generating through our common actions. To some extent, Deterritorialized Living could then also be considered as an information design, delivered in the form of an atmosphere.

As the result of its initial and designed rules, this milieu develops strange behaviors: daylight is always “on” (as there are always activities on the networks) but at variable strengths, nighttime never occurs, air composition regularly reaches “physiological enhancement” levels of high altitude, it is composed of a unique single day that goes back and forth and that ideally last forever, continuous. There are no months, no years.

Deterritorialized Living is delivered in the form of open data feeds which define this “geo-engineered” yet livable environment, computed by the deterritorialized.org server. We expect to develop and use the troposphere in the future in the form of installations, responsive devices and architecture projects.

But the artificial troposphere is also freely available to architects, artists, designers, scientists and makers of all kinds in the form of different “services”: Deterritorialized Air (N2, O2, CO2, Ar), Deterritorialized Daylight (visible light Intensity, IR, UV) and Deterritorialized Time (HH:MM:SS). Additional feeds and refined rules will be added along the time to mature this generated atmosphere.

The live parameters, data and charts that show the evolution of values for Deterritorialized Air (N2, O2, AR, CO2).

Values for Deterritorialized Daylight, including Intensity (lm, visible light), Infrared (w) and ultraviolet (w) as well as Deterritorialized Time (HH:MM:SS), with their related charts. It is interesting to note that the generated time changes along time... but not in a linear manner, it varies between 06:32 and 19:36.

Man page explaining how to access the different data feeds for the ones who would like to develop their own project out of Deterritorialized Living.

These algorithmically designed data feeds can therefore be used independently or combined to drive experimental devices, interfaces, software and speculative livable environments of all kinds (under the responsibility of their authors...).

Thursday, September 05. 2013

Designed by Roberto De Luca and Antonio Scarponi as modular office space—Hotello is portable space. Packed into the bright red trunk is everything you need to create a 6.5 × 6.5 ft square workspace in minutes. From the metal frame, to the furniture, to the curtains surrounding the space itself.

The workspace

Trunk and workspace

The workspace

The workspace

The trunk

The open trunk

Meant to convert the vast echoing and often abandoned spaces in our cities—empty warehouses and factories—into liveable space, the Hotello has a serious side, as in a disaster situation private space could be created for large numbers of people in a relatively short amount of time.

Monday, May 02. 2011

Even if this is rather a riding area and playground for moutain bikers (or such) underneath a highway (see below the glacier image), it can give us additionnal ideas toward a sort of "architecture as landscape" approach. We consider "architecture as landscape" a different type of variable environment: it is not the infrastructure that evolves (robotized and heavy approach), but the light, the weather, the (networked, mediated or computed) conditions, the creolization and spatial interferences.

Similar to a landscape where climate and context evolve and where you "freely" migrate within, depending on the conditions and your activity or needs. A sort of Sanaa's Rolex Learning Center, but diy approach.

I'm also therefore taking the occasion to mention this new book about a similar topic:

Landform Building, Lars Müller Publishing

Thanks to @BLDGBLOG for the following link, via F.A.D. (Free Association Design)

While in Seattle this past weekend I had the chance to make a brief stop by the city’s Colonnade Park. Given it’s size, I managed to cover about half of the accentuated terrain (on foot) built into the underbelly of the I-5.

The brilliance of the park’s siting becomes obvious when you are immersed in it: the steep and jumbled topography; the formerly barren and listless ground in the shadow of the overpass; the industrial cathedral that serves as ready-made shelter for the 9-out-of-12 soggy months of the Northwest climate; and perhaps the most critical factor – the challenges and indifference towards such spaces – which allowed for it to be co-opted into something else equally unique and unpolished.

[storage shed built into a ramp and elevated planks]

It hard not to be enamored by the successful and improvised gestalt of the whole thing, in both program and materials. Much of what it is made of was donated or recycled from demolition projects around the city. And typical off-the-shelf items, like permeable waffle pavers (above), have been retooled as robust and removable cellular confinement systems. All the pieces of the circuits have this hand-made, custom quality that is site + multiple user specific.

One comes away with the impression that the park will keep remaking itself incrementally, over and over again. Pieces and segments will be modified as they wear out, with new experiments being plugged in as desired. It seems that the builders and volunteers that have constructed it might actually be a little forlorn if the park were ever fully finished.

Thursday, April 21. 2011

Very nice edited picture by Philippe Rahm architectes on Rahm's Facebook account. It's about a publication in Hochparterre, a swiss magazine. I haven't read the article yet... but the picture describes a sort of climatically variable, imaginary "landscaped" architecture according to what I speculate. Architecture as variable landscape. I like it a lot.

To understand why the different "functions" are at different level and why you would need to use ladders to get there, you should check this project.

Tuesday, February 22. 2011

Alan Gibney was over at Arup a couple of weeks ago testing a Wireless Sensor Network design tool in number 8 Fitzroy Street that he developed during his PhD on a tool for wifi access point positioning.

Using a 3D info of the building the tool allows us to figure out the best location for network gateways based on the required location of sensing nodes and the material characteristics of the building. This particular installation was of interest since the majority of the office is open plan which means that the “stuff” that interferes with wireless signals is much more dynamic and difficult to model than say a concrete wall or a glass partition which is traditionally quite stationary and has modelable properties.

Data Capture Process

The process shown in the sketch above involved 1] identifying sensor locations on the fourth floor of number 8 Fitzroy, 2] walking around the floor plate taking measurements of signal strength for each node in different areas, 3] mapping the signal strength, 4] generating a heatmap of gateway options, 5] running agent based optimisation algos to select optimal gateway positions.

Signal strength of node in different locations of office

The signal strengths were then loaded into the design tool to verify that the actual were similar enough to those predicted in the model. With a mean error of 1.41 the model seemed pretty robust.

The design tool then allows a variety of gateway / sensor nodes positions to be tested and compared for different types of optimisation (battery life, signal robustness, minimising nodes required etc.)

Topology of possible WSN

A ray launching method is used to propogate the signal strength from a node to a gateway with the journey being recalculated using a motif model that describes the radion propogation model of a material. The image below shows the heat map generated for a gateway positioned in the open plan area of the office.

Candidate gateway locations

Measurement vs Prediction

Heat map based on signal strength from gateway

Next steps are to use the design tool to model the whole building in preparation to roll out a 200+ node WSN in the building. The aim of the installation will be to monitor light (lux) levels in the office alongside occupancy to analyse and optimise both light comfort levels and energy efficiency.

fabric | rblg

This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.

We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.

Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.

This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.